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Our fleet: machines and vehicles

Our fleet of vehicles and machinery works hard all year round.

Whether measuring and repairing rail faults, surveying the railway from above, clearing snow, or transporting materials, we have machines for the job.

Watch our video to find out more about our fleet

Our machines and specialist trains

Looking after the railway presents many challenges. Our fleet are based at strategic locations around the country, according to the tasks they do, so they’re ready to get to work on the railway when needed.

Here are some of the types of work we do where the machines we use are invaluable:

  • infrastructure monitoring – from trains that use ultrasound to find faults within the rails, to those that monitor and record track geometry (our New Measurement Train or NMT)
  • maintaining and renewing the tracks
  • transporting materials such as ballast and rails for our work – this includes our rail delivery train, on-track plant delivery team, and aggregates wagons
  • maintaining and installing overhead line equipment
  • inspecting and clearing drainage
  • maintenance support (such as our mobile maintenance train, or MMT – our ‘workshop on wheels’)
  • testing ECTMS/in-cab signalling for the Digital Railway.

We own many of the machines we use, but sometimes suppliers provide them for our work programmes, and at other times we work with suppliers to adapt vehicles to suit our needs.

Find out more about our machines and vehicles

Did you know?

  • Our fleet teams have 24/7, 365-day access to a helpline to support moving them around the network, helping to manage when incidents occur, as well as to report the critical information directly across the network including each Route Operating Control.
  • Measuring almost one kilometre, our High Output ballast cleaner is the longest train on our network.
  • Not all our fleet teams use machines that run on rails. Our Air Operations team makes use of a helicopter and unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs, or drones). We also have on-track plant that can travel on the roads as well as the railway. Examples include diggers, vehicles to inspect and clear drainage, mobile flashbutt welders (to weld the rails), track movers (which pick up and move track), and some of the vehicles we use to inspect and renew overhead wires.

Our specialist teams

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